You can’t make people feel the same enthusiasm that you do for your work. Either they have it, or they don’t. I’ve come to really believe something that my personal life guru Dave Ramsey said regarding leadership- You can’t motivate people. You can only hire motivated people. This is a lesson learned the hard way.

You need to carve out more unproductive time. Get less done for a while. You’ll probably realize that a bunch of the shit that zaps your attention and time needn’t be done at all. Just let it slide and see that it probably just didn’t matter. Very few things ultimately do.

Productivity is all about focus, which in turn is all about a narrowing field of view. Shutting out the rest of the world. But many novel solutions require just the opposite: An expansive field of view, letting in the rest of the world.

Look, you obviously can’t have your head in the clouds all year long. But for highly motivated people that doesn’t seem to be a danger as much as having your head in the grind 24/7.

So what have we done? Simply, we asked the people affected — women in their postdoctoral period — for their ideas.

For our institute, some of the simplest changes included steps to ensure that all important meetings are held within school hours, to make sure that researchers with child-care duties can attend.

We have also set up a dedicated office with hot-desks and an adjoining room in which small children can play and older children can do homework or watch television, under the supervision of their parents.

Social scientists often seek to demonstrate that a construct has incremental validity over and above other related constructs. However, these claims are typically supported by measurement-level models that fail to consider the effects of measurement (un)reliability. We use intuitive examples, Monte Carlo simulations, and a novel analytical framework to demonstrate that common strategies for establishing incremental construct validity using multiple regression analysis exhibit extremely high Type I error rates under parameter regimes common in many psychological domains. Counterintuitively, we find that error rates are highest—in some cases approaching 100%—when sample sizes are large and reliability is moderate. Our findings suggest that a potentially large proportion of incremental validity claims made in the literature are spurious. We present a web application (http://jakewestfall.org/ivy/) that readers can use to explore the statistical properties of these and other incremental validity arguments. We conclude by reviewing SEM-based statistical approaches that appropriately control the Type I error rate when attempting to establish incremental validity.

If someone wants to see him, they are told to call and set up the meeting when they can see him tomorrow. So if you want to meet with him next Friday, you call next Thursday and say “Can I see Mr. Buffet tomorrow?”

I love the simplicity of the rule: I can see you today if you asked me yesterday, but I can’t fill up my schedule any further in advance. This way he can determine how he wants to spend his time within the context of the next 24 hours instead of booking things weeks or months in the future. Now his schedule is relevant instead of prescient.

I’m sure many people will say “well, he’s Warren Buffet so he can do that”. Yes he’s Warren Buffet, but no one granted him the power to do that or say that. He decided that.

Understand the ways that the system is biased against women and the role that we all play in maintain the status quo.

Revise your syllabi to include work by women.

Reach out to women (especially junior women) by incorporating them in professional networks and inviting them to participate in special issues and topical conferences.

Refuse to participate in men only events (i.e. panels, forums with all men).

Call out instances of bias when you see them.

Don’t hijack women’s conversations in professional settings, and work to ensure everyone is expected to speak in important conversations when you are in charge.

Ask women about their research.

Work to change the system when you can (advocate for parental leave policy, advocate for attention to genders issues in your department like uneven service obligation, bring up gender bias in teaching evaluations whenever this is used to evaluate faculty, advocate for back-up care, subsidized daycare, attention to public school breaks and holidays in establishing academic calendars, and spousal hiring).

Good summary and interesting background on the ASA's statement on p-values.

Let’s be clear. Nothing in the ASA statement is new. Statisticians and others have been sounding the alarm about these matters for decades, to little avail. We hoped that a statement from the world’s largest professional association of statisticians would open a fresh discussion and draw renewed and vigorous attention to changing the practice of science with regards to the use of statistical inference.

When asked to perform the same task, different individuals exhibit markedly different patterns of brain activity. This variability is often attributed to volatile factors, such as task strategy or compliance. We propose that individual differences in brain responses are, to a large degree, inherent to the brain and can be predicted from task-independent measurements collected at rest. Using a large set of task conditions, spanning several behavioral domains, we train a simple model that relates task-independent measurements to task activity and evaluate the model by predicting task activation maps for unseen subjects using magnetic resonance imaging. Our model can accurately predict individual differences in brain activity and highlights a coupling between brain connectivity and function that can be captured at the level of individual subjects.

Much recent attention has been paid to quantifying anatomic and functional neuroimaging on the individual subject level. For optimal individual subject characterization, specific acquisition and analysis features need to be identified that maximize interindividual variability while concomitantly minimizing intra-subject variability. We delineate the effect of various acquisition parameters (length of acquisition, sampling frequency) and analysis methods (time course extraction, region of interest parcellation, and thresholding of connectivity-derived network graphs) on characterizing individual subject differentiation. We utilize a non-parametric statistical metric that quantifies the degree to which a parameter set allows this individual subject differentiation by both maximizing interindividual variance and minimizing intra-individual variance. We apply this metric to analysis of four publicly available test-retest resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) data sets. We find that for the question of maximizing individual differentiation, (i) for increasing sampling, there is a relative tradeoff between increased sampling frequency and increased acquisition time; (ii) for the sizes of the interrogated data sets, only 3-4 min of acquisition time was sufficient to maximally differentiate each subject with an algorithm that utilized no a priori information regarding subject identification; and (iii) brain regions that most contribute to this individual subject characterization lie in the default mode, attention, and executive control networks. These findings may guide optimal rs-fMRI experiment design and may elucidate the neural bases for subject-to-subject differences

Linguistic processing is based on a close collaboration between temporal and frontal regions connected by two pathways: the “dorsal” and “ventral pathways” (assumed to support phonological and semantic processing, respectively, in adults). We investigated here the development of these pathways at the onset of language acquisition, during the first post-natal weeks, using cross-sectional diffusion imaging in 21 healthy infants (6–22 weeks of age) and 17 young adults. We compared the bundle organization and microstructure at these two ages using tractography and original clustering analyses of diffusion tensor imaging parameters. We observed structural similarities between both groups, especially concerning the dorsal/ventral pathway segregation and the arcuate fasciculus asymmetry. We further highlighted the developmental tempos of the linguistic bundles: The ventral pathway maturation was more advanced than the dorsal pathway maturation, but the latter catches up during the first post-natal months. Its fast development during this period might relate to the learning of speech cross-modal representations and to the first combinatorial analyses of the speech input.

Comprehensive analysis of brain function depends on understanding the dynamics of diverse neural signaling processes over large tissue volumes in intact animals and humans. Most existing approaches to measuring brain signaling suffer from limited tissue penetration, poor resolution, or lack of specificity for well-defined neural events. Here we discuss a new brain activity mapping method that overcomes some of these problems by combining MRI with contrast agents sensitive to neural signaling. The goal of this “molecular fMRI” approach is to permit noninvasive whole-brain neuroimaging with specificity and resolution approaching current optical neuroimaging methods. In this article, we describe the context and need for molecular fMRI as well as the state of the technology today. We explain how major types of MRI probes work and how they can be sensitized to neurobiological processes, such as neurotransmitter release, calcium signaling, and gene expression changes. We comment both on past work in the field and on challenges and promising avenues for future development.

Non-invasive assessment of white-matter functionality in the nervous system would be a valuable basic neuroscience and clinical diagnostic tool. Using standard MRI techniques, a visual-stimulus-induced 27% decrease in the apparent diffusion coefficient of water perpendicular to the axonal fibers (ADC⊥) is demonstrated for C57BL/6 mouse optic nerve in vivo. No change in ADC|| (diffusion parallel to the optic nerve fibers) was observed during visual stimulation. The stimulus-induced changes are completely reversible. A possible vascular contribution was sought by carrying out the ADC⊥ measurements in hypercapnic mice with and without visual stimulus. Similar effects were seen in room-air-breathing and hypercapnic animals. The in vivo stimulus-induced ADC⊥ decreases are roughly similar to literature reports for ex vivo rat optic nerve preparations under conditions of osmotic swelling. The experimental results strongly suggest that osmotic after-effects of nerve impulses through the axonal fibers are responsible for the observed ADC decrease.

Please don’t tell me, then, that it’s OK because everyone who needs access to the literature has it. I can’t get everything I wanted and, spending weeks in a hospital, I could hardly “go to the library”. I’ve been lucky to find a few pieces spread here and there.